Boulder County is home to its fair share of rock stars in the extreme sports world, but it also boasts women and men who have scaled the heights in more traditional pursuits.

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Few athletic ventures are more steeped in tradition than tennis, and Lafayette is where you can find the man who is currently the co-ranked year-to-date No. 1 men's 70-and-over tennis player in the country. That would be Bob Litwin; and there is absolutely nothing traditional about how he got there — given that he played no tennis in college, and never was on the professional tour circuit.

Litwin, 71, is left-handed, and maybe it could be said he brings a lefty's perspective to life. In looking at the unusual arc of his journey, he notes that his college education in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he graduated in 1970, came at the height of that era's youthful rebellion.

"I became sort of, through Michigan, unknowingly very counter-narrative. In everything," he said, noting that term "has been attributed to me a lot."

Tennis was not a part of his life at Michigan, where he tried to walk on to the tennis team. On the first day he was told to go play with the school's top freshman recruit.

"He beat me in, like, 30 minutes, 6-0, 6-0," he said. "I took the one racket that I had brought to school with me, put it in the back of a closet, and didn't hit another ball until maybe five, six years later."

How Litwin, a native Long Islander who relocated to Colorado 3 ½ years ago, transformed himself not only into a tennis champion, but a successful performance coach with clients at Wall Street hedge funds, and a widely-read self-help author is — as he recounts it — an improbable drama in three acts.

'Writing a different story'

The curtain would rise for Act I on Long Island. That's where Litwin, after first having been drafted to coach tennis at the New York school where he was teaching junior high history, gradually found a better-paying path as successful tennis instructor at private clubs. It was at a time when tennis was enjoying a significant surge in national popularity.

"It was really a low self-esteem job. I was hired help," Litwin recalled. "People might not even know my name — 'Oh, the tennis pro' -— especially at some of these golf and tennis clubs, where tennis was a second activity for a lot of the these people."

Despite the fact that he was being paid a decent sum to hit tennis balls all day in the sunshine, "I didn't feel good about it. I was with people who were, in my mind, successful. Whether it was because of the kind of job they hand or they had a lot of money or a nicer car or whatever it was, they were a member of a club. And I (just) worked there."

From the outset, Litwin's style as a coach followed his typically counter-narrative course. Before teaching his first lesson, he had run to a library to take out a basic Sports Illustrated primer on the sport, to learn names of racket grips and other basics. But his approach was nothing found in such books.

"I started asking people questions about why they hit the ball well, when they did. If it was one time out of 10, I'd be like, 'What did you do?' And they would say, 'Oh, I've just been so frustrated, I just didn't care.' And I'd be, 'All right, you didn't care. Let's work on not caring a little bit more.'"

In his early 30s, Litwin decided he needed to rethink his mental approach to his job. He vowed to change the story he was telling himself about what was happening in his life. "Writing a different story" would become a central theme in his life.

"I changed my story to, wow, I get to work outdoors in the summer playing tennis. I don't have to exercise, because I am hitting tennis balls for seven hours a day. Everyone else is running to the gym after work," he said.

"When people come to me, it's often the best part of their week — not because of me, but because it's a lot better than a lot of their other activities. They're playing a game, and so they're really enjoying being with me."

A dramatic attitude shift, and a realization that he was teaching life skills, and mental approach — more so than merely proper correct forehand and backhand grips — spurred his rebranding as a performance coach.

Soon, most of his coaching came in coffee shops, not on the courts.

One of Litwin's students has been Gerald Marzorati, formerly the editor of the New York Times Sunday magazine, now a tennis writer for NewYorker.com, and author of "Late to the Ball," a memoir of exploring whether he could become a nationally competitive tennis player after 60. He called Litwin his "tennis shrink," Most of their instruction sessions took place via Skype.

"He's got an amazing way of discerning what your personality is as a tennis player, and making you aware of it," Marzorati said.

"We all have different personalities when we play a sport, that might or might not have aspects of our real-life personality. He was really able to help me focus, to help me be more competitive. Which was something I lacked, frankly."

Soon, Litwin would be taking his teaching skills into broader arenas, working to help clients playing other sports to improve their focus and find their best versions of themselves. He did so not just on their fields of play, but also in seminar settings.

"The seminars were a definite move away from the tennis court, as well as saying yes to opportunities," Litwin said. "Other people were saying, 'What are you doing? You're not at that level, you're not that person.' But I would just say 'yes,' and kind of figure it out.

He figured it out well enough to land spot-consulting gigs with basketball's New York Knicks and hockey's New York Islanders.

"That was the first major shift for me, in my life, changing my career," Litwin recalled.

"Because, that led to me being drawn into Wall Street. I am no longer teaching tennis, on the tennis court. I am now a mental training/performance coach. That's what I do. And then, that grew."

'My trajectory is up'

Act II, his second major catalyst for change, played out very much on the tennis court, after Litwin decided in his mid-30s to see if he could become a successful tournament player on the national circuit.

With a weak backhand and a lack of competitive experience on big stages, the immediate answer was, decidedly, no. Not at first.

Again, he realized that unless he changed the story he was telling himself, the former touring pros and onetime Division I collegiate stars he was pitted against would keep him in the loser's column,

"I figured out if I could change my story I would be making some progress," he said. "So I changed my story to things such as, well, my trajectory is up. Their trajectory is down. They have already been as good as they're going to be, most likely. Because if the played D-1 tennis, and now they are 35, they're not as good as they were. Me, I'm going the other direction.

"My story was, I'm enthusiastic. I'm patient. I'm in it for the long haul."

Litwin soon played and won three national-caliber tournaments for competitors 35 and older.

"I kept telling other people my good stories and I kept experimenting with different ways of getting better. The counter-narrative," Litwin said.

"On changeovers, where everybody would sit on their chair and drink their water and be toweling off, I would be doing yoga postures. I would be closing my eyes and meditating for, like, 30 seconds. These other guys were like, 'Litwin, what is he doing now?' But I was getting results."

By the time he was 55, Litwin claimed the International Tennis Federation World Championship in 2005, and found himself ranked No. 1 in the world for men 55 and older.

"It was crazy," he said. "I was putting one foot in front of another and climbing the mountain, without even knowing it was a mountain."

A win without playing

Litwin's most recent success was winning the Wilson World Tennis Classic at the Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, Calif., on Jan. 25, where he topped Brian Cheney, his frequent doubles partner and the past winner of 90 national titles, 6-2, 7-5.

"One of his several strong points is his ability to cover the court," said Cheney, a Chandler, Ariz., resident. The grandson of May Sutton, the women's winner at Wimbledon in 1905 and 1907, and the son of Dorothy "Dodo" Cheney, who became the first American to win what is now known as the Australian Open in 1938, Cheney has known Litwin nearly 30 years.

"He's got good wheels, he's got a very strong forehand, and from a mental standpoint, he is very competitive and knows how to stay focused on competition."

But Litwin, who blogs on his exploits, considers his biggest victory to have come in 2004 at the ITF World Championships in Philadelphia. Despite winning his semifinal match there, he declined to play the finals, slated for Yom Kipur, out of his respect for his family's Jewish faith.

"People said, 'Can't you ask your rabbi?' And I said, 'First of all, I don't have rabbi, and if I did, it's not for the rabbi to make this decision for me, to give me the OK. I just don't do it.'"

He had notified tournament officials months in advance that there could be such a conflict, but to no avail. Unyielding from tournament policy that only signed medical excuses were valid grounds for withdrawal, officials recorded him as having simply defaulted. As the No. 1 seed, had he played and won, he would have secured the world title .

"I gave away the World No. 1 ranking to support my mission," he wrote in his book, "Live the Best Story of Your Life: A World Champion's Guide to Lasting Change."

"My biggest win in tennis was in a match that I never even played."

The ITF has since broadened its approved reasons for not playing a tournament to include "religious reasons."

Litwin's first world title in his age group came the following year.

'Two angels'

Act III in Litwin's story is documented in the opening chapter of his book. He revisited it as snow blanketed the Boulder County landscape on Wednesday.

Successful in his performance coaching business as founder of The Focus Coaching Group, with a long list of big wins to his credit on the tennis court, he was hit with the horrific news in 2007. His wife, Carol, was diagnosed with breast cancer. With a second cancer diagnosis in 2010, she was on a downward track.

"She was very, very sick over the last three to four months of her life," he said. "And that period of my life, those three years — but especially that last year — was probably the most remarkable period of my life, of my being faced with the hardest match I'd ever played."

In caring for his wife through that ordeal, he said, "I was forced to be the best version of myself. And the depth of the love, the relationship with my family, the sacrificing who I was, to take care of Carol, it all took me to a whole other level of my being. That was, for me, a great outcome of something that had a really bad ending."

In the wake of his first wife's death, Litwin then was faced with a hip surgery that had to be "revised" two years later, with the caution that he would likely not be able to play tennis any more.

But that was not the story Litwin was writing for himself. That diagnosis has been proven resoundingly wrong.

He remarried in 2012. He and his wife, Jo Ann, who was originally from Colorado, moved here in 2015. Together they share five daughters and eight grandchildren.

"I'm very, very, lucky that the woman I married, Jo Ann, is such a remarkable person that she was able to welcome my life experience with Carol into our relationship from the very beginning," Litwin said. "She is the second angel of my life. Some people never get to be with one, and I'm with two.

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